Women have been debating whether lad mags are sexist for so long that the average media studies sixth-former could probably have scripted most of yesterday's discussion on Radio 4. One of the genre's leading titles, Nuts, launched its own cable TV channel last night, and a Nuts TV spokesperson was invited on to Today to persuade the feminist writer Natasha Walter that the station was in no way sexist. Nuts TV's female - naturally - executive offered the familiar, if outlandish, proposition that lad mags "celebrate" and "respect" women. Walter said that's funny, because they look exactly like a vision of old-fashioned sexism, not female empowerment.

Walter is so self-evidently right that you wonder how this "debate" can still be taking place. The reason - and the problem - is that the feminist critique has consistently failed to account for women's own complicity in the genre.

The Nuts website, for example, features a page called Assess My Breasts, inviting men to study photos of naked breasts and rank them - which doesn't seem particularly respectful. But the thousands of images have been uploaded by ordinary women - "entirely voluntarily", for free, as the spokeswoman took pleasure pointing out. Without these willing armies of female volunteers, there would be no breasts for any readers of Nuts to assess - or any of the "Real Girls!" beloved of porn shoots, and no "High Street Honeys" for FHM porn scouts to find.

"A lot of young women feel very angry" about lad mag culture, Walter still insisted - but the evidence is, regrettably, against her. Circulation figures for lad mags have actually been plummeting; fewer and fewer men are buying them, and the genre's bubble is widely believed to have burst. More and more women, however, are giving every impression that they would consider it a compliment - indeed a triumph - to be objectified in the manner of a cover girl.

A recent American book, Pornified, chronicles countless cases of schoolchildren videoing themselves having sex - on the school bus, surprisingly often - and distributing the footage via their mobile phones. I had hoped this was a peculiarly American phenomenon, but at a London school where a teacher I know works, a pupil recently videoed a younger girl giving him a blowjob in the school toilets, then uploaded her performance straight on to YouTube.

I used to think that rumours about normal, well-adjusted teenage girls posting topless pictures in chat rooms for boys they had never even met were alarmist myths. But I spent some time around 12-year-olds this summer, and it turns out they are absolutely true. This week FHM was censured for publishing a photograph of a topless 14-year-old without her consent - but the real shock came in FHM's revelation that it receives more than 1,200 submissions of women topless or in lingerie every single week.

It is no wonder a lot of men now genuinely believe that women want to be treated as sex objects. Who could blame them when so many of us have internalised an exhibitionistic ideal of our own objectification? You could argue, I suppose, that women who put headless photos of their naked torsos on to the internet are still suffering the legacy of millennia of male sexual oppression. But there must come a point where it is simply implausible to keep blaming men.

"The beauty industry is a monster, selling unattainable dreams. It lies, it cheats, it exploits women." The woman who said that was mourned this week as a progressive feminist heroine - so it's a pity, and a puzzle, that Anita Roddick spent her life encouraging women to buy into it - but she was far from alone. Postfeminists in the 90s assured women they could safely re-embrace their "femininity" without sacrificing equality or credibility.

And so manicures, and Brazilian bikini waxes and pole-dancing classes were all reintroduced under the guise of harmless girly "fun". Barely 10 years later, we look in the mirror and mistake ourselves for sex workers.

If we do not want to find channels like Nuts TV on our televisions, we are going to have to stop lying to ourselves and each other. That would mean we have to stop buying pre-teen daughters T-shirts that say Babe In Training or Born To Shop, or taking them to see Bratz: The Movie. It means not reading any more magazines devoted to laughing at a celebrity for having a sweatmark on her dress, and not watching any more Living TV - the closest female equivalent on cable to Nuts TV, being targeted explicitly at women and consisting almost exclusively of programmes about breast enlargement.

It is hard to see how men can be expected to notice a distinction between professional sex objects and the vast majority of women if we can't tell the difference ourselves.